Random Friday Facts: TV Edition

What? You’re one of those people who works out all the time and doesn’t even own a TV/has no idea what Hulu is/thinks all television is a waste of brainpower? Move along, nothing to see here.

1. I wrote about TV professionally for almost three years, from December 2006 through August 2009, before I started grad school.

2. When your job is to write about TV, you can never, ever complain about your job to anyone whose job isn’t also to write about TV. When you say “No, I can’t go to happy hour tonight, I have to watch Grey’s Anatomy,” most people will laugh at you.

3. When I applied for my TV job, one of the shows I wrote about was Friday Night Lights, which had just premiered the night before I wrote the application. Among other things, I wrote that the pilot made me cry my contacts out, which was 100% true.

4. Even after switching careers, I keep finding ways to watch TV for work. I did a research internship largely based on the fact that I knew a lot about TV. My master’s thesis was about practices of TV-watching. I worked on a project about Twitter and Glee that was just presented at a conference. I love what I’m doing right now because it’s my first job away from TV in more than five years, but I imagine I’ll find my way back eventually.

5. Hulu didn’t exist when I started my job. Most of the networks were just starting to stream shows online. TV execs were still trying to figure out how to deal with people watching shows on DVRs, much less all the sanctioned and unsanctioned ways that exist now. It honestly blows my mind how much the industry has changed.

6. When people ask me what shows I watch, I have to go by days of the week, even though we DVR almost everything and watch it whenever. Right now, it’s: Sunday, Luck; Monday, Smash; Tuesday, Dance Moms, Switched at Birth, and Parenthood; Wednesday, Modern Family, Suburgatory, Top Chef, and Revenge; Thursday, Parks and Rec, The Office, Up All Night, Project Runway, and Grey’s Anatomy. I also recorded the whole last season of Chuck on Fridays but I haven’t watched it yet.

7. Yes, that’s a lot of TV. I can own that.

8. I also watch tons of stuff OnDemand and on Hulu Plus on my phone at the gym.

9. Shows currently not on the air that I can’t wait to see come back: Breaking Bad, The Big C, the BBC show Twenty Twelve, Homeland, and — honestly — the ABC Family show Make It or Break It.

10. I used to watch The Hills and the new 90210 and a whole lot of ABC Family shows for work. I no longer have a concept of a “guilty pleasure.”

11. The most personally heartbreaking cancellation I encountered during my time covering TV was Pushing Daisies, and that’s mostly because Chuck and Friday Night Lights somehow managed to keep getting renewed.

12. I used to go to the Television Critics Association press tour twice a year, where all the networks trot out their stars for interviews with TV critics and reporters. I live by the idea that what happens at TCA stays at TCA, but get a few drinks in me and I will tell you some stories.

13. Some of my all-time favorite shows (not currently on the air): The Wire, Six Feet Under, Friday Night Lights, My So-Called Life, Significant Others, the first few seasons of The West Wing.

14. Other than my encyclopedic knowledge of My So-Called Life, I don’t have a strong memory of many of the TV shows I watched as a kid. I didn’t watch Seinfeld. I didn’t watch much Friends. (I did watch Frasier, because apparently I was always a 40-year-old woman.) A whole lot of TV references get lost on me.

15. When the DVR gets backed up, I watch competition reality shows first, because I don’t want to get spoiled on Twitter.

I *love* TV and often have in-depth conversations with some of my friends on the different shows that we watch. I am probably one of the few people left who still watches Grey’s, but since I started watching from the very first episode, I feel like I need to see it through to the very end.

Oooh, I like this post. I don’t watch very much TV at all, but I can appreciate a good show for sure. My mom was obsessed with FNL, so I bought her the box set of the entire series for Christmas. I watched the pilot with her over Christmas and also bawled my eyes out. Then, I bought the entire first season for myself. Can’t wait to watch it!
Did you watch Veronica Mars, by chance? It is, by far, my most favorite show of all time. It’s awesome in every way.
Next on my list (after FNL) is The Wire. A lot of my good friends, and my bf, swear by it.